Famous Last Words

"Hey—watch this!"

(thanks to Tom and Ray on Car Talk)

New Cherry Tomatoes

I have four volunteer cherry tomato plants that came up and are fruiting even in the extreme heat we're having. This flower is obviously not a tomato flower but is beautiful nonetheless:

The black cherries are about halfway there. They will turn a bit darker and are larger than red cherry tomatoes and taste wonderful:

Some "regular" cherry tomatoes are also fruiting. I have no idea what variety these are as I have volunteers every spring that just appear from dropped fruit off past plants. I'm always amazed at how plants always find a way to reproduce themselves:

This is my collarless, neighborhood feline friend who appears silently on my front porch several times a week, like Sandburg's fog that "sits looking . . . on silent haunches and then moves on." S/he prefers the water out of my garden watering can to the fresh water I put out for h/er, and turns up h/er nose at the expensive cat food I bought for h/er. Cats. (I think it's a she since, periodically, I will see a tom with a lean and hungry look in his eye sitting, waiting, a few feet away. Men.)

Vegan Men

Nice to see men speaking out for good health and compassion for animals via a plant-based diet:

Vegans in Vegas, May 2011 from Ryan Henn on Vimeo.

Pictures of the Tour de France

A beautiful album of large-format pictures covering the recent Tour de France race, showcasing the incredible scenery, the craziness of the fans, the passion of the riders, and the enormity of the race itself is here.

This sample: Three-time Tour winner Alberto Contador punches a fan dressed as a doctor who was running alongside him on a steep climb sticking a stethoscope on his chest. I saw this on television when it happened but this is a better image. Hopefully this (doofus) fan needed a doctor after Alberto's intervention.

Fiddlesticks

When I was a child, I often heard my father exclaim, "Fiddlesticks!" at a point of frustration. I never thought to ask him what "fiddlesticks" meant and never bothered to find out. A wild guess would suggest it had something to do with a fiddle and some sticks, but what?

Here's an illustration of someone playing fiddlesticks—two light sticks used to tap out a percussive beat on the strings of a fiddle while the fiddle is being played. This musical style apparently developed in early American/pioneer/old time music settings -- but don't know much more about it than that. In a time when musical instruments were at a premium and folks were easily entertained, I guess it was easy to invent new ways of being musical.

And I still don't know why my father used it as an expression.